Alex Balhatchet

• Website: kaoru.slackwise.net
• About: CTO at Lokku Ltd.

Recent Actions

• Posted Travis CI ♥ Perl to Alex Balhatchet

  Travis CI is a hosted continuous integration service for the open source community.

  Essentially you set up a git post-commit hook that causes your tests to get run on every commit, against a number of different Perl versions, with databases and other services available if needed. And it's …

• Commented on Better late than never - Perl School is awesome!
  They are not recorded, but if you attend one then you get a password which gives you access to the slides. And I'll let you in on a little secret - that same password gives you access to the slides...
• Commented on Better late than never - Perl School is awesome!
  No problem, glad to remind you :-)...
• Posted Better late than never - Perl School is awesome! to Alex Balhatchet

  Three Saturdays ago I attended the fourth Perl School, which was about DBIx::Class.

  Top line summary: it was brilliant!

  This was the second course I've attended from Dave Cross, and the fir…

• Commented on Ask JAPH - A Tumblr Experiment
  There is a way to use CNAMES with tumblr. If this experiment is a success I'll definitely consider grabbing a domain. Got my first question! Unsurprisingly it was about the version number debate... not really the kind of question I...
• Posted Ask JAPH - A Tumblr Experiment to Alex Balhatchet

  So Tumblr, well known blogging platform, has this feature where you can set up a simple site and then invite people to ask you questions. I thought it would be fun to try out doing this for Perl.

  http://askjaph.tumblr.com/

  Why?
• Commented on Initial entry
  perl -E 'say "Hello, blindluke";' # :-)...
• Commented on Refactoring When Tests Are Failing
  "I should write more about --state. It has a lot of neat features" I presented at a London Perl Mongers technical meeting about TAP::Harness and some of the cooler things you can do with prove late-ish last year. Slides are...
• Commented on YAPC::Europe 2012 Keynote on Agile Companies
  Any news on when and where the video will be up? Really hope I'll be able to see this sometime! Thanks, - Alex...
• Commented on Mojolicious: an unexpected result
  I expect the real problem at these companies is that they don't know how to manage CPAN modules (or any other dependencies) properly. At $work we use hundreds of CPAN distributions amounting to over 1000 modules, and adding another distribution...
• Commented on The comma operator
  Rather than using the unintuitive "=()= operator" you can also use the maybe-slightly-more-intuitive-ish-but-probably-slower arrayref-deref option: $a = @{ [ (6, 1, 1, 1, 7) ] }; say $a; # 5 ------- Although when you would use that over the much...
• Commented on Job postings on blogs.perl.org
  Thanks for the clarification, very relieved to hear my post wasn't against the rules. Although maybe when I posted it it would have been better to get in touch first given that this clarification didn't exist at the time, so...
• Commented on Experienced Perl Developer sought by Lokku Ltd (Nestoria)
  tlrrd: Well, if you’re going to post a perl jobs postings where it shouldn’t go, then I guess we’re allowed to discuss it? Are job posts not acceptable on blogs.perl.org? I did look out for such a rule before posting...
• Posted Experienced Perl Developer sought by Lokku Ltd (Nestoria) to Alex Balhatchet

  (cross-posted from jobs@london.pm.org)
  

  Hi guys and girls,

  We're looking for a Perl developer with 2+ years of experience programming
  professionally to join our engineering team in central London, primarily to…

• Commented on Revitalizing LinkedIn's Advanced Perl Users Group
  > You're a CPAN author (and it's listed in LinkedIn) Is the "correct" way to list this to list it as a Job? I've seen others do it this way: http://www.linkedin.com/in/edmundvonderburg So that's what I've done too: http://www.linkedin.com/in/alexbalhatchet Looking forward...
• Commented on Is PCLI possible?
  First thing that springs to mind is encoding of the various inputs. Encoding of the config file is determined by the editor used to write it. Encoding of @ARGV is (probably??) determined by the terminal and LC_* variables. Encoding of...
• Commented on Preventing Collisions with Perl cron jobs
  We do this at $work with a command-line tool called lockrun. You can find the source here: http://www.unixwiz.net/tools/lockrun.html It uses file based locking with the flock system call. Very effective....
• Commented on Ninja Code
  "Write a Perl script to print the first 10 numbers of the Fibonacci sequence" is one of our standard interview questions - not had anybody write it like this yet ;-)...
• Commented on perlfind - perldoc on steroids
  I foresee myself using this at least once a week for the rest of my life. Can't believe I didn't write it myself. Thanks Ovid!...
• Commented on True + True == 2
  Maybe it's supposed to be that way? The "!= 2" code ensures that both subroutines run, which you may actually want? Although if your "check_*" methods have required side-effects you have a whole other host of problems :-)...
• Posted Debugging Memory Use in Perl - Help! to Alex Balhatchet

  Hey,

  Cross-posting this from a Stack Overflow Question asked by a colleague.

  Some processes that run for multiple hours (ETL jobs…

• Commented on Updates to CPAN module reviews
  Seconded, thanks so much for spending your time on this and then sharing your results with us all, it's very useful! Always looking forward to the next one :-)...
• Commented on Rethinking smart matching
  Ricardo's table takes away the one feature of Smart Match that I actually liked, which is the emulation of Python's "in" keyword. http://www.xinotes.org/notes/note/622/ I propose a table like this... $a $b Meaning ======= ======= ====================== Scalar Array Scalar is an...
• Commented on Dancing on a cloud made of pearls
  Nice! I copied your instructions and they worked very well :) http://www.kaokun.dotcloud.com/ I did notice a small bug in your code: $name =~ s/[^a-z0-9 ]//i; Should read: $name =~ s/[^a-z0-9 ]//ig; - Alex...
• Commented on Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
  Looks like my (2) is in 5.14 too! Faster: http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl-5.14.0-RC1/pod/perldelta.pod#Optimisationofshift%28%29andpop%28%29callswithout_arguments Less memory: http://search.cpan.org/dist/perl-5.14.0-RC1/pod/perldelta.pod#@_usesless_memory Awesome :)...
• Commented on Ch-ch-ch-ch-changes
  1) no bugs (http://bugs.perl.org) 2) runs faster and uses less memory 3) reverse debugging support (step forward, step backward in "perl -d") Anything else I would like to change (OO, method signatures, etc.) is already possible thanks to Moose! I...
• Posted Faster Perl debugging through crazy tricks? to Alex Balhatchet

  Hi all,

  I'm at work right now, waiting for some code to run in the Perl Debugger and I got to thinking. Right now I've set a break point and I've hit "c" for continue executing, and in the background the debugger is doing all these checks on every single line and slowing down the execution…

• Commented on Introduction to wirting readable and maintainable Perl
  @pyrimidine - thanks for the typo correction :) @nxadm - thanks! would you mind if I used that photo on blog.nestoria.co.uk? @SawyerX - good to see you too! Playing with Dancer a bit, will have to get on IRC and...
• Posted Introduction to wirting readable and maintainable Perl to Alex Balhatchet

  Hey all,

  I just got back from FOSDEM 2011 last night and had an absolute blast, especially on Sunday when I spent the whole day in the Perl devroom. Thanks to everyone who came!

  I gave a talk called Introduction to writing readable and maintainable Perl and I thoug…

• Commented on Caching multi-statement computations using an anonymous subroutine
  I don't think the "//=" is required, it could just be "="? perl -E 'sub i { state $i = 0; $i++; say $i; } i() for 1 .. 10;' 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10...

Recent Actions from Alex Balhatchet

Comment Threads

• Aristotle commented on The comma operator

  Well if someone really values consistency very highly, there is no way of selling them Perl and no point in trying. The design of the language does in fact – though it tries to avoid breaking consistency for no good reason – not treat it as a primary goal. If that is what you want in a programming language, well, then you won’t be very happy with Perl and why should I try to convince you that your misery is enjoyable?

  OTOH, frankly, I don’t think Shawn’s position is very deeply reflected, which I was implying in the last comment. All languages have inconsistencies, and gene…

• Ovid commented on Refactoring When Tests Are Failing

  Alex, it looks like you gave a great summary.

  I find it interesting that you mention doing more unit tests instead of integration tests. Yes, that's probably faster, but I find the latter tends to expose more bugs for me.

• Best essay writing service commented on Ask JAPH - A Tumblr Experiment

  Inviting people to ask you questions would be great but now the problem would be if they ask you questions that you do not have an answer leave alone having the correct answer for them. Another problem would be giving the wrong answer to a question and to make it worse you think that is the right answer.
  …

• Dave Cross commented on Better late than never - Perl School is awesome!

  @Alex: Thanks for the blog post. Glad that you enjoyed it so much.

  @Erik: Perl School is really cheap, so I don't have the money to do clever stuff like recording them. It's possible that something like that might happen in the future though.

• mascip commented on Better late than never - Perl School is awesome!

  I found the class really excellent and would recommend it to anybody wanting to start using DBIx::Class, or to improve their use of it.

  If you manipulate databases or plan to, and don't know what DBIx::Class is, then you should definitely go.

  Thank you Dave

Responses to Comments from Alex Balhatchet